You know about cookies … the little bits of data that your operating system, your browser, and the Military Industrial Complex conspire to leave on your hard drive for purposes of marketing and mass social control and stuff.

Cookies are actually quite wonderful because they allow your interactions with the web to be smarter. But nefarious forces have, of course, ruined it for everyone by exploiting this link between you and the web in various ways.

You can set your browser to not accept cookies and then you have no problems, and everything will be fine. Right?

Well, no actually. In fact, we have to talk. Below the fold, please.
I know that I said yesterday that I was done for a while with the Linux Command line stuff, but I’m not. I’m going to tell you about/remind you of a little problem known as Flash Cookies.

Flash cookies are related to Flash … the annoying yet wonderful software thingie that animates so many of our web pages, shows videos, etc. Flash has its own cookie system, and it is potentially nefarious in two ways. One: It is not turned off when you turn off cookies in your browser options. Two: It can be used to re-animate, bring back to life, or to use the technical term “re-spawn” regular cookies that you have diligently removed manually or with anti-cookie software.

Yes, dear readers, it is true. Flash cookies are like horcruxes for regular cookies.

Most people use Windows and are thus screwed because there is no easy way to even find these cookies in Windows. But Linux is fundamentally different because of the way ythe system itself works. You can find them, you can examine them, you can destroy them, and you can prevent their creation to begin with. If Dumbledore used Linux, he’d not be nearly as dead as he is today.

The way you find them is simple. You make sure you are at the top directory (home) and issue this command:

find -iname ‘*.sol’

This will locate all of the files. If you want to know how many they are, pipe the output to wc with the -l option to count lines:

find -iname ‘*.sol’ | wc -l

I had 110 of these when I looked.

How do you kill them? Well, get that list form find of the file names, and send it to a command to kill the files. Look at this:

find -iname ‘*.sol’ -ok rm “{}” \;

This sends the output of find to the Mystery Brackets which follow the rm command. This command substitution magic will send each file to utter oblivion (no trash can) because “rm” means “re-totally-move this file, man!”

The -ok option causes this line to ask you permission, Windows like, before deleting each file. You should really remove the -ok option and just blotto the suckers.

How do you keep these commands from coming back? Well, they are stored in a limited number of directories on your computer. All you need to do is to change the permissions on those directories so that flash can’t put stuff there.

Carla Schroder tells us how:

Maybe you don’t want the darned things on your system at all. As usual, Linux lets you control your own system and doesn’t mind if you want to prevent Flash cookies from nesting on your system at all. There are a number of ways to do this. Flash cookies reside in two directories, ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/ and ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/. If you want to see these in a graphical file manager, make sure you have “view hidden files” enabled. Delete all the files in these directories, then change the permissions to mode 0500, which is read-only and execute:

Check out Carla’s three part post on these flash cookies for much, much more information, including a way to find out (sort of) what company or agency is putting these things on your hard drive. Carla’s stuff is here.

It says no file found, but I think that’s because you have the word .micromedia twice in a row.

I adjusted for that, but I don’t get the “mode of” response showing that changes have been made. I just get the blinking cursor prompt with the dollar sign.

I tried the command “chmod -Rv 0500” again and it does give a “mode of” response. I guess I want to try to allow flashplayers to put these ‘cookies’ on my machine, for now at least, until I understand what’s going on.

The original “chmod -Rv 0500” is a little risky. The “chmod -Rv 0700” has the same risk, so you’re not making anything any worse by using it.

What’s the risk? If there are any files left under those directories, both chmod commands make them executable. Accidentally executing a file that was never meant to be executed can be… interesting. The system will try to run each line of a text file as a command. Amid what might be hundreds of lines of error messages you can’t tell whether one of those lines did something harmful. I have lived mostly in command line mode for over 20 years, and this has happened to me only 2 or 3 times. It’s not a big risk.

In the command line I gave you, I changed the “-Rv” to “-R”, to prevent what I thought were uninformative messages simply telling you that the command is working. You would only see output if something went wrong. And something did go wrong, because I accidentally included that redundant occurrence of “.macromedia” when I was editing my message.

After I posted my previous message, I did an experiment: I exited from the browser, removed the .macromedia directory completely, restarted the browser, and viewed a video. Everything worked. If the contents of your .macromedia directory are so damaged that your browser is crashing, this could be useful knowledge.

About this blog

The science is mostly climate change, life science, evolution, and science education. The science policy and politics is mostly about climate change and the evolution-creationism false controversy. The technology is mostly about Linux, regular normal person computer use, kids programming, and now and then, household items.

As an Anthropologist and Africanist, I often write about those topics as well.

Usually, I write about one or two topics for a while then shift to something different. This is not systematic, and has to do with context and external forces such as: Is this a presidential election year? Are we having an El Nino? Is there a fight going on somewhere about teaching creationism in a public school? Did I just get a cool new robot toy? Like that.

So, if you don't find the most recent few posts interesting, have a look at the topics below. But, of course, chances are you got here with a Google search and you'll never read this "about" thing.